412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.

The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

The motive of success is not enough.

You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.